Summary
In this chapter, we introduced the concept of IaC and why it is critical to DevOps. IaC makes the provisioning of cloud resources faster, more consistent, and, ultimately, more secure. There are several IaC tools, but Terraform has emerged as the de facto IaC tool for it is easy to use and, through the concept of providers, can be used with any cloud provider.
You provisioned your first resource in Google Cloud using Terraform in Google Cloud Shell. But as most cloud engineers and architects prefer to use their own machines, you learned three authentication methods for using Terraform on your local PC while provisioning resources in your Google Cloud project. We showed why service account impersonation is the preferred method of authenticating Terraform by eliminating the risks associated with service account keys.
The chapter also introduced variables to make Terraform configurations more flexible and showed the different methods of assigning values to variables.
In the next chapter, you deepen your understanding of Terraform by delving into the inner workings, discussing the concept of the Terraform state, and introducing additional concepts of the Terraform language.
Before you go to the next chapter, make sure that you have removed all servers not to incur any unnecessary costs. The beauty of IaC and Terraform is that you only need to rerun Terraform to recreate resources if you need them again.
